Rubiana

The name may come from Arubianus, a Celtic god, or from the Latin ruber, red, after the colour of the earth here, which is heavy with iron. The first document naming Rubiana dates from 1029, though the basin had been lived in for centuries.

The village sits inside an amphitheatre of mountains, among chestnut, oak and beech woods, and it used to yield fruit: chestnuts, apples, cherries. Above Mompellato, in the eighteenth century, a sanctuary to the Madonna della Bassa was raised in memory of an event that tradition calls miraculous and places in 1713.